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Tag: Quasi-Anti Religion

Respecting an Establishment of Religion

Every nation gets the religion that it believes in.

Published May 3, 2013
Categorized as Anismism, Philosophy, Politics, US History Tagged Anti-Religion, collective identity, Popular Sovereignty, Quasi-Anti Religion, religion, The Exception

From the Featured Archives

Prelude to an escape from history
(20)
November 17, 2010
Culture & Entertainment, US HistoryExhaustion of the American Idea as National Idea Hegel's Philosophy of World History
Prelude to an escape from history
(20)
November 17, 2010
Culture & Entertainment, US HistoryExhaustion of the American Idea as National Idea Hegel's Philosophy of World History

Pessimism about one's own nation is an all-encompassing and all-defining condition, because everything any of us positively can be or seek as individuals is affected where not wholly determined by our membership in a national community - the state broadly defined.  When we refer to an "unhappy childhood," it will usually matter a great deal whether we're referring to our own childhood, and the same is true when we refer to the unhappy conditions of our national upbringing or to a "broken" national home.  Yet national pessimism is still not the same as absolute pessimism.  We can imagine the failure of any nation, including our own nation, as we have seen great national disasters, that would not equate with the failure of history itself.  We could even come to equate the failure of a national idea as essential to some higher good:   It would not be the first time for us, just the first time that we were referring to ourselves.

A national pessimist suffers a kind of exile from his own future, but he can still visit happier outcomes, on a kind of spiritual visa.  Over time, he may even be accepted by the natives, and find a new home.  Americans are particularly well-prepared to make this transition, because our national identity, paradoxically, is already built on the cancellation of nationality, on immigration and nothing else.  Our new citizenship may not be full and authentic, of the blood and soil, but neither is the one with which we are born.  The American idea at inception had before it a vast national phase to undergo, but what defined the American nation was that it was not and never could be a nation like the others:  The idea of a new world had to take on a purpose-fabricated national costume for us to assume and sustain a place within the world of nations, but the realization of our idea could never have been contained in a merely national destiny.  For the same reason, the victory of our "Greatest Generation," at our national apogee, was the victory over ultra-nationalism, in favor of a new international system implying the supersession of nations, justifiable as an American national project strictly on that basis.  All of our history since that time has been governed by the same paradox of nationalized internationalism, but from the other, declining side, as accompanied by the conversion of American energy into mere mass - the accumulation of material wealth alongside the decay of national institutions.

We can therefore look forward to the completion of our creative self-destruction with greater hope, or at least with greater equanimity, than others in our approximate position have been able to muster.  What we stand to lose is everything we never really thought was worth having.  What we stand to gain is what we always sought.

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"The Triumph of Death," Pieter Bruegel, The Elder
The Ephemeral Sublime vs The Triumph of Death
(2)
December 4, 2014
Art, notes, Philosophy
"The Triumph of Death," Pieter Bruegel, The Elder
The Ephemeral Sublime vs The Triumph of Death
(2)
December 4, 2014
Art, notes, Philosophy

"The Triumph of Death," Pieter Bruegel, The Elder "The Triumph of Death," Pieter Bruegel, The Elder
To treat the past as nothing because it is or seems inaccessible to us is to imply the nothingness of every present destined to fall into it next - to make the substance of life the triumph of death... and therefore it is not thus.

Continued

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Ghost Machine
(7)
May 6, 2012
Art, Internet, Movies, Philosophy, Technology, TVApple Samuel L Jackson Siri Zooey Deschanel
Ghost Machine
(7)
May 6, 2012
Art, Internet, Movies, Philosophy, Technology, TVApple Samuel L Jackson Siri Zooey Deschanel

self(-)consumption

Continued

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Noted & Quoted

Keith Spencer: …data shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate – Salon.com
(3)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election
Keith Spencer: …data shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate – Salon.com
(3)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election

TV pundits and op-ed writers of every major newspaper epitomize how the Democratic establishment has already reached a consensus: the 2020 nominee must be a centrist, a Joe Biden, Cory Booker or Kamala Harris–type, preferably. They say that Joe Biden should "run because [his] populist image fits the Democrats’ most successful political strategy of the past generation" (David Leonhardt, New York Times), and though Biden "would be far from an ideal president," he "looks most like the person who could beat Trump" (David Ignatius, Washington Post). Likewise, the same elite pundit class is working overtime to torpedo left-Democratic candidates like Sanders.

For someone who was not acquainted with Piketty's paper, the argument for a centrist Democrat might sound compelling. If the country has tilted to the right, should we elect a candidate closer to the middle than the fringe? If the electorate resembles a left-to-right line, and each voter has a bracketed range of acceptability in which they vote, this would make perfect sense. The only problem is that it doesn't work like that, as Piketty shows.

The reason is that nominating centrist Democrats who don't speak to class issues will result in a great swathe of voters simply not voting. Conversely, right-wing candidates who speak to class issues, but who do so by harnessing a false consciousness — i.e. blaming immigrants and minorities for capitalism's ills, rather than capitalists — will win those same voters who would have voted for a more class-conscious left candidate. Piketty calls this a "bifurcated" voting situation, meaning many voters will connect either with far-right xenophobic nationalists or left-egalitarian internationalists, but perhaps nothing in-between.

From: There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate | Salon.com

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Eli Zaretsky: Trump’s Charisma – LRB Blog
(5)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election
Eli Zaretsky: Trump’s Charisma – LRB Blog
(5)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election

Understanding Trump’s charisma offers important clues to understanding the problems that the Democrats need to address. Most important, the Democratic candidate must convey a sense that he or she will fulfil the promise of 2008: not piecemeal reform but a genuine, full-scale change in America’s way of thinking. It’s also crucial to recognise that, like Britain, America is at a turning point and must go in one direction or another. Finally, the candidate must speak to Americans’ sense of self-respect linked to social justice and inclusion. While Weber’s analysis of charisma arose from the German situation, it has special relevance to the United States of America, the first mass democracy, whose Constitution invented the institution of the presidency as a recognition of the indispensable role that unique individuals play in history.

From: Trump’s Charisma

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Matt Yglesias: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying – Vox
(0)
Operation American Greatness
Matt Yglesias: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying – Vox
(0)
Operation American Greatness

[E]ven Fox didn’t tout Bartiromo’s big scoops on Trump’s legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, “We’re doing a big infrastructure bill,” means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.On some level, it’s a little bit funny. On another level, Puerto Rico is still languishing in the dark without power (and in many cases without safe drinking water) with no end in sight. Trump is less popular at this point in his administration than any previous president despite a generally benign economic climate, and shows no sign of changing course. Perhaps it will all work out for the best, and someday we’ll look back and chuckle about the time when we had a president who didn’t know anything about anything that was happening and could never be counted on to make coherent, factual statements on any subject. But traditionally, we haven’t elected presidents like that — for what have always seemed like pretty good reasons — and the risks of compounding disaster are still very much out there.

From: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying - Vox

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Extraordinary Comments

  • 2016-05-14 12:18 pm
    To CK MacLeod
    An Ancient Peruvian Mystery Has Been Solved From Space – IFLScience
    Wade McKenzie

    I've given a little more thought to your citation of the Roman aqueducts, and I realize that I missed something important about it--it posed far [...]

  • 2013-06-10 8:26 pm
    not discussing a conservative understanding of the sexual division of labor
    Robert Greer

    CK, I love this. Like you, I've had misgivings about the liberal feminism that's popular right now, and I've found it hard to articulate [...]

  • 2014-04-18 12:10 pm
    David Bentley Hart as Atheist (On Creative Principle and Creator Principal)
    Lee M.

    I think there's plenty of blame to go around here. Gopnik seems stunningly ignorant of the Western theistic tradition, at least based on the quote [...]

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